4. Chosen Idea and Refinements




After discussing with Julian as well as Mike, I've decided to choose the first idea, "Take My Heart". I'll probably rename it for the formative assessment, but for now it's Project Heart.

Issues

For the interaction part of the project, my initial idea was to have a microphone placed on the podium so that users could use it to record their own sounds. I took into consideration the possibility that the visitors to the exhibit might not take the project very seriously, and thus end up "trolling", or making a joke out of it, recording swear words or just random fart noises. This is why I intended to filter the submissions at the end of every day and only add ones which were deemed "appropriate".

After talking to Dionysia about the project, she voiced the opinion that the project was a tad bit "cheesy" - bordering on sentimentality that the most likely audience of my exhibit won't relate to. This increased my concerns that giving the audience too much freedom in what they contributed might lead to chaos. Dionysia suggested tying the project to the potential of sounds to trigger memories in dementia patients. However, after doing some research into this, I decided against it in the end since I had very little understanding of dementia and do not think it's something my target audience might relate to or empathise with.

New Direction? (Old direction?)

I still wanted to stick to the original concept involving a beating heart, but I needed to change the context and the way that people could interact with it. I thought of the group project that I worked on in the first semester of Level 5 - A physical musical launchpad which could tell a story (further details can be found here). The one I made in level 5 was fairly simple in its code, and the musical elements in each section could not really be mixed and matched together.
A Musical Journey, an interactive storytelling exhibit

The original idea for that project was inspired by Madeon's Adventure Machine, and I tried to think of a way to integrate this idea into my current project - letting people create a mix-track of their own memories.

With this in mind, I'm planning to integrate some level of launchpad-like interaction for users. The challenge will be to make something new and improved, and not just a re-skinned version of my Level 5 project. I also need to see what role the molded heart might play in this new interaction - will it be merely for display? Or maybe users can use different organs and arrange them in a certain way to make their own memory track? I'm really not sure at this stage, but I'm gonna need to keep plodding on and figure something out.


References:
Madeon's Adventure Machine. (2015). Madeon's Adventure Machine. [online] Available at: https://www.madeon.fr/adventuremachine/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].





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